So I was on my Local Gumtree the other day to find any Pcs or Amigas to Flip for Profit for my Project and up Popped a Beige Coloured Pc Case. not a lot was Mentioned other than the HDD size and 2GB Ram. The Beige Case got me thinking though that the Pc must be quite old so I Chanced it for the £30 Asked and I got it to Find a Socket 478 Jetway P4XFA Motherboard inside Sporting a Intel Celeron 1.7GHZ Processor and some Pretty Swanky Zalmann CPU Cooling. It also has a Radeon 7500le AGP GPU. Am Currently Installing Windows 98se as this is Backwards Compatible to MS-Dos Mode

Words Cannot Describe the Smile upon my Face and the Rush of Nostalgia Flowing through me Right now is Intense!

Congratulations for the find! A pentium-4 system is too good for dos games only, you can also enjoy a lot of games of the win98 era.

I would include also some Sierra and Lucasfilm adventures to the list. And RTS games too:
command and conquer
command and conquer - red alert
warcraft 1 & 2
Dune II
Starcraft (this is a windows game)

As a fellow dos retrogamer, the fist thing I would check is sound blaster compatibility of the sound card. The pc is from an era where it cannot be taken for granted. You may have to load some dos drivers before playing the games, and the quality of audio in dos games can be anywhere from terrible to very good. Do not expect 100% compatibility in any case. Do you know what is the audio chip in the motherboard?

If you have sound issues, and the mb has a free ISA slot, you can solve the problem by installing a true sound blaster card or one of the many clones. If you have only PCI slots, there are a few cards from ESS and Yamaha with excellent dos compatibility.

Would it be the awesome Zalman Flower. Im still sporting mine 12 - 13 years on. I don't need any other cooling (even though I have 6 fans running), fan never turns even when my true 6 core CPU is at full tilt.

Older wing commander on that box will work bit too fast. They work too fast on my P2 @ 450MHz.

Win98SE + DOS Shortcuts is a way if you like to use DOS. MS made it quite easy to setup configuration and create different shortcuts for different setups or use shortcut to prompt for what configuration to load.

Of course, all of this make sense only if you can find good Win98/DOS drivers for all components in your computer.

Wing Commander is very picky on CPU speed. It suffers of speed issues on anything faster than a 386. Even the 486SX @ 25MHz that I had back then was too fast (the very lowest of 486): I had to switch off the "turbo button" to play the game.

Today, on my K6-2 @ 400 Mhz I play WC with both L1 and L2 caches disabled: this slow down the CPU to the level of a 386 and the game plays just fine.

EDIT: disabling caches on a P4 is not sufficient, the CPU is still too fast. At minute 9:20 you can find a test of Wing commander on a P4 with caches disabled
[ Show youtube player ]

Would it be the awesome Zalman Flower. Im still sporting mine 12 - 13 years on. I don't need any other cooling (even though I have 6 fans running), fan never turns even when my true 6 core CPU is at full tilt.

Congratulations for the find! A pentium-4 system is too good for dos games only, you can also enjoy a lot of games of the win98 era.

I would include also some Sierra and Lucasfilm adventures to the list. And RTS games too:
command and conquer
command and conquer - red alert
warcraft 1 & 2
Dune II
Starcraft (this is a windows game)

As a fellow dos retrogamer, the fist thing I would check is sound blaster compatibility of the sound card. The pc is from an era where it cannot be taken for granted. You may have to load some dos drivers before playing the games, and the quality of audio in dos games can be anywhere from terrible to very good. Do not expect 100% compatibility in any case. Do you know what is the audio chip in the motherboard?

If you have sound issues, and the mb has a free ISA slot, you can solve the problem by installing a true sound blaster card or one of the many clones. If you have only PCI slots, there are a few cards from ESS and Yamaha with excellent dos compatibility.

I had to Change the SYSTEM.inf to Allow for the Extra Ram to be Recognised. Took me three hours to Figure out the onboard audio was VIA AC97 and not Realtek AC97 hahaha and was installing the wrong Driver but all is Correct and installed now. the Radeon is now Supported by DX9.0c :-) The Closest Disc I had to Test the Setup was Grand Theft Auto III and not even barely a stutter! Going to Dig out my Big Box games tomorrow from Mothers and see what I have. it's nice to see that this Post has Gathered interest I Really Appreciate Advice and Tips :-)

There is no ISA Slot so Unfortunately no Original SoundBlaster but I am Definitely Looking to Upgrade Both Graphics Card and Sound Card. the Graphics Slot is AGP could anyone Recommend a Solid All Round GPU?